Wherefore Etiquette?

A few words about behaving like a human being

Photo: Twitter

I sometimes think people taking photos of the screen at the cinema is why Trump won. A semi-serious thought, admittedly, but still, half serious. Over the weekend, my social media feeds were full of people sharing photos and videos they’d captured while watching Wicked. There was also the backlash to those people. I’m not interested in Twitter drama, but this wasn’t just a Twitter thing. Over on TikTok, videos galore, taken during the movie, in the theatre.

I’d like to make one thing clear: these people are animals.

Perhaps this is just the inevitable end state of a society build on individualist, consumerist ideals, a perfect product of capitalist libreralism. Our experiences in public existing not as communion with other people, but as opportunities to express our personalized branding. Wicked is not a film to see and feel in a room with others, but a vehicle with which to tell the world, “I am seeing Wicked,” as though that implies something about the kind of person one might be. Not inside, as a human being. No, humanity has nothing to do with it. It’s all branding, a superficial concoction we’re all expected to have now, because how else would we signal our purchasing habits and thus our personality?

Hardly a surprise, then, that etiquette has flown out the window in recent years. This is hardly limited to movie theatres. It’s enough to walk down the streets of Toronto to discover a total lack of care for the fact that public spaces are, definitionally, shared spaces. Movie theatres are but a great petri dish within which to view this societal degradation. There has been a social contract involved in seeing a movie at the cinema. Everyone, out of respect for everyone else, refrains from engaging in behaviour that would likely be distruptive to others in the audience. There’s a give-and-take in this. You ask me, someone munching on popcorn too loudly should be sent to The Hague, but as in any shared space, negotiation takes place, even wordlessly. Lately, though, the negotiation has ceased, and selfishness has been claiming victory.

During the summer, I went with my roommate to see Twisters in IMAX on opening night. Throughout much of the film, there was a woman one row down and many seats over who jabbered incessantly. It’s possible her boyfriend was talking, too, but I really only heard her. So did others around us in the not-so-sold-out show, eventually prompting another woman a couple rows down to get up and walk over to the talker and ask her to quiet down. The talker was visibly taken aback, but did stop talking. For all of a few seconds, before loudly complaining to her boyfriend about the offence of being told to be quiet during a movie. Finally I piped up, shouting (necessary because of the distance between us) at her to shut up. Again she appeared offended, voicing her frustration, until a few others also shouted her down. At last, she shut up. Mostly. Apparently unfamiliar with the concept of whispering, she did start talking again near the end of the film, albeit at a slightly lower volume than before. When the movie ended, as the credits rolled and my roommate and I got up to leave, the talker was waiting, ready to confront me. You see, it was I, the person asking her to stop being distruptive, who had broken the social contract in her mind. “It’s a public space!” she argued, as though that entitled her to behave in any manner suiting her. “Have you never been to a movie before?” I responded, though at that point others in the theatre were backing me up, and as we left, we could hear her picking fights with them, too.

That was an extreme case, though now that I think about it, I recall another screening at the TIFF Cinematheque around the same time where I told the guy sitting next to me to quiet down, and he responded in with ugly sarcasm. I told him, “You don’t have to be a dick,” and he started playing a game of I Know You Are But What Am I? He appeared to be in his 30s.

It’s all anecdotal, but it’s real. Look no further than the person who posted a video, filmed in the theatre, of the entire “Defying Gravity” finale of Wicked to Twitter. When people called them out for it, they seemed to think the only problem was posting spoilers. Filming the screen, that’s just obviously okay. That it likely distracted others in the theatre during the movie’s emotional and narrative climax never entered this person’s mind, and finally being informed of the issue, they remained indignant.

Of course, this is not most people, but it seems to be a growing issue, especially post-pandemic. At first I thought the issue was people being locked indoors too long, getting a little too used to the freedom of their living rooms and bringing the same attitude out into the public. That may indeed be an influence, but the explanation no longer feels sufficient, so I start thinking about Trump. In a society centred on the individual, there really isn’t much of a society at all. Thatcher’s dream fulfilled. The public sphere has effectively been transformed into a playground of consumerist satisfaction and powered interests. There is no social contract anymore because everything is a literal contract, our lives defined by transactional relationships with people and things alike. The economy feels funky and nothing about the world gels anymore, and rather than pursue collective enrichment and shared humanity, it’s so much easier to light everything on fire and focus on getting what’s ours. Like taking photos of the screen at the movies.